I’ve used iGoogle for ages as a start page, as have many people, so Google’s announcement that they’ll be killing it off late in 2013 came as a bit of a shock.

Ok. No big deal. Surely, there are any number of “Home page” sites out there that can do essentially what iGoogle did.

Well, yes and no.

My first stop was PageFlakes. I’d messed with it several years back, when it was first introduced. But alas, PageFlakes has flaked out and is no more.

MSN has a “home page” type service, but I wasn’t terribly impressed.

Yahoo too. Just really cluttered. I liked iGoogle for it’s simplicity, among other things.

This Might Actually Work

Then I came across a mention of a site called NetVibes. Reading up on it, it looks like it’s more geared toward sys admins that need to keep an eye on statistics about a range of websites, all from a single dashboard. Great stuff, but that aspect costs a few bucks a month.

However, you can sign up for a free account, and set up all sorts of news widgets, RSS feeds, etc, that can populate your home page, just like on iGoogle. It’s got lots of great “ajaxy” stuff like drag and drop positioning, nice configuration GUI’s, a huge theme selection, etc. With the right theme (I chose “World”), it looks almost identical to the clean lines of iGoogle (though it does have an oddly out-of-place top action bar thing going on. Still, not a dealbreaker).

And, I was able to find widgets (or grab RSS feeds) for every single element I had on my iGoogle page.

Plus, it’s really trivial to drop new RSS feeds in place (I do that all the time to watch for specific things for sale on CraigsList).

All in all, a great replacement for iGoogle.

Check it out!